Ramblings: Striving for Consistency (Mar 15)

steve laidlaw

2018-03-14

After Tuesday’s discussion of goalie fatigue, I got to thinking about the most important traits a goaltender can have. Undoubtedly, you want a goalie playing on a good team. We’ll never completely parse the impact of goalie talent, player talent, coaching and systems, but for fantasy owners you’ll do well in goalie stats by playing goaltenders on playoff teams.

You also want to avoid injury-prone goalies. There’s no sense in burning a high pick on a goalie if he isn’t going to be there for you in the fantasy playoffs as owners of Ben Bishop, Carey Price, Mike Smith and Cory Schneider can attest. Goalies in their 30’s with groin issues are in my no-fly zone. Mind you, I’ll draft any player if the value is right. Should an injury-prone goalie drop to where he’d be my #3 option, I’ll gladly roll the dice. Otherwise, let them be another person’s problem.

Lastly, you want a goalie who is consistent. A few years back I latched onto Rob Vollman’s quality starts stat as the best measure of goalie consistency. For the unindoctrinated, quality starts are defined as any start where a goalie provides a league average save percentage (0.917) or higher, or allows two goals or fewer with a save percentage above 0.885. Essentially, did the goalie have a night where he gave his team a chance to win? Or for the fantasy owners, did the goalie have a night where he didn’t wreck your stats? With a quality start the answer is yes so fantasy owners should be seeking out goaltenders who most consistently answer that question with an affirmative.

After getting crushed by Pekka Rinne in the head-to-head playoffs last week, I can attest to how ruthlessly consistent he has been for fantasy owners all season. It’s a major feather in his cap towards Vezina consideration. While his competition is fading, Rinne continues to play at an elite level.

The problem with quality starts is that it’s not a very predictive stat. It can tell you what has happened, but not necessarily what will happen. This study shows that simple save percentage does a better job of predicting future quality start percentage than does past quality start percentage. That bodes well for guys like Price, Murray and Talbot who have all battled with consistency this season.

Check out the same list of starters this time ranked by career quality start percentage and also with their career save percentage included:

If the best predictor of future consistency is simple save percentage, you could do worse than going into your draft with a list of starters ranked by career save percentage. I put more art than science into building my pre-season goalie tiers, but I put roughly 40% weight into the strength of team, 40% into past performance (consistency) and 20% into injury history.

Given the weight that team factors carry we are still months away from being able to rank goalies for next season.

Sportsnet points out that this first period collision involving Roman Polak and Alexander Radulov going into Frederik Andersen is the only significant contract that the Toronto netminder took tonight, if you believe his disappearance is a case of injury, not illness pic.twitter.com/lDjIeYV0PT

Curtis McElhinney came on in relief and hung on long enough to secure a shootout victory. The Leafs have two capable netminders in Garrett Sparks and Calvin Pickard waiting in the minors should Andersen miss any time.

With the Leafs facing a back-to-back tonight, you can bet that Andersen won’t be playing.

James van Riemsdyk netted a hat-trick. This was just his second game of the season skating more than 18 minutes. His roles has been diminished but is still heavily used in offensive situations. I worry that someone is going to give him a Lucic-esque contract, but he can help a team looking for a good net-front option.

Alexandar Georgiev has moved to 3-2-0 as a starter with four quality starts. Not a bad run for a rookie on a stripped-down team. You know that I believe any goaltender can have utility in a small sample. This looks like yet another example.

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Not all of my post-deadline takes have worked out great, but so far Derick Brassard is struggling to produce in a reduced role in Pittsburgh. He has three points in eight games, while averaging a little over 15 minutes per game. Even his shot volume is down a bit with 18 SOG in eight games. For keeper leaguers, you can’t be too enthused that he is locked in for one more year in Pittsburgh. Sure, they have fire power, but isn’t going to see too many shifts with Sidney Crosby or Evgeni Malkin, which really reduces how lucrative this spot can be.

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After a couple of games out Oscar Klefbom returned and produced a goal and an assist, making the past couple of weeks a highly productive run for the struggling defenseman. I wish they’d just shut him down and get his shoulder surgery over with, to avoid risking any damage and to get his rehab going to be ready to play games that matter.

The Oilers continue to experiment with Ryan Nugent-Hopkins on Connor McDavid’s wing. He has three goals and five points in six games since returning. It’s awfully hard to fail skating alongside McDavid, but this duo has been dangerous.

Kris Russell was lost to a hand injury after (what else) blocking a shot.

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Forget the Calder, give Brock Boeser the Hart trophy. The Canucks have scored just three goals in five games since he got hurt and have been shutout in three straight contests. This is how you tank!

Bo Horvat has just one point in those four games. I haven’t forsaken Horvat yet, but we’re getting close.

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Has anyone seen Jonathan Marchessault? He has now gone six straight games without a point, crushing fantasy owners during their playoff matchups. The absence of Reilly Smith is notable in this run, but is that really all it took to push him into a cold streak?

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Jared Spurgeon will miss at least four weeks after partially tearing his hamstring on Tuesday night. This ends a breakout season for the 28-year-old. With 37 points, he finishes one shy of the career high he set last season, but he seemed like a sure bet for 40+ points.

Over the past four seasons Spurgeon has been right on that borderline for fantasy relevance, but finally tipped over the edge with enhanced power play usage. He ranks 20th in goals among defensemen (tied with teammate Matt Dumba) over this stretch, and 37th in defenseman points. No one ahead of Spurgeon has less than his mere 37 power-play points. His 13 PPP and 2:37 PP time per game are both career highs.

Spurgeon will be a final round target for me next season. You can almost punt one defenseman slot expecting to get him last round. That’s how overlooked I expect him to be after this injury. Hell, he was overlooked all season despite grading out as a top-40 defenseman in standard leagues.

The only real mark on Spurgeon’s record is that this continues a run of injury-proneness. In seven seasons since making the league full time Spurgeon has missed 84 games, an average of 12 per season. Availability is the best ability. I am more than willing to gamble on health in a head-to-head format where I just need health come playoff time, you may be less willing to do so in points-only formats.

Dumba will take on a heftier load and has done well when called upon to do so in the past. He could have an explosive final dozen games although in such a small sample this could swing either way.

Losing Spurgeon won’t help Minnesota’s playoff hopes, or their hopes of making noise once they get there. Devan Dubnyk has been much improved in the second half. Maybe this won’t affect him too much. It’s too late to make any changes even if it does.

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Tony DeAngelo will miss 3-4 weeks with an ankle injury. Seems like a missed opportunity for the young defenseman. With the Rangers’ rebuilding, and also absent Kevin Shattenkirk, there have been minutes to go around. DeAngelo has skated 17 minutes a night with secondary power play time over the past two months. He hasn’t been particularly productive, with seven points in 24 games since being recalled, but if he was going to produce, it needed to be now. He’s already on his third team in three years as a pro. He’s only 22, so there is still time, but this was a big opportunity. No guarantee the Rangers are this bad next season.

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Dobber’s latest Top 200 Forward Prospects list is out. It’s worth noting because he finally graduated a bunch of rookies who were well established, so this list gives you a better idea on where to rank prospects sitting outside the NHL.

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Pierre LeBrun raised the notion of expanding the playoff field in his piece for The Athletic yesterday. To which I respond, you could expand the playoff field to 30 teams and the Sabres still aren’t making it.

In all seriousness, I am pro expansion of the playoff field, but with a few caveats. Yes, expanding the playoff field would diminish the regular season to some degree. Good! The regular season is a slog. 82 games is about a dozen too many. Give me a 70-game season that’s a couple of weeks shorter, has no bye weeks, fewer back-to-backs and no three games in four nights that put incredible strain on the league’s elite talent. It’ll never happen because of ticket revenue, TV rights deals, etc. but if you were starting a league from scratch today, you’d never have an 82-game season. This is pure momentum.

Anyways, in my reduced season scenario, you’d have at least two extra weeks to play with, but I wouldn’t even necessarily use them in expanding the playoffs. Instead, I’d use them to eliminate June hockey, which amazing as it is, is simply too late in the year to host the Stanley Cup finals. It’s gorgeous outside in June. You lose casual fans by that point in the year.

Expanding the playoffs gives you a chance to recoup some of the revenue lost by cutting the season down, because whatever type of play-in format you choose it’s going to be must-see TV. And these are playoff games, so owners are going to crank up ticket prices for these events like they always do. It won’t balance out completely, but it’ll do a good job.

I know there is concern that expanding the playoff pool would diminish the playoff race, but I think it would enhance it. Let’s say you had two play-in games in each conference, with 7-10 and 8-9 facing off for the seventh and eighth spots in the true playoffs. Well now you’ve got three lines teams are trying to cross. Teams would still push to get a high seed for home-ice advantage, but you’d also have teams pushing to make top-six in the conference to escape the play-in. You’d have teams pushing to finish seventh or eighth to get home-ice in the play-in. Lastly, you’d still have teams clawing to get into the play-in at all.

In past seasons we’ve had what amounts to a play-in game on the final day of the regular season with teams facing off for the chance to make the playoffs. You could still have those in this scenario! This mechanism just guarantees that you’ll have at least four each season, instead of the current method where the NHL schedules all the teams to play divisional games on the final day and praying for fireworks. Also, these play-in games would be played with playoff rules. So instead of a FUCKING SHOOTOUT potentially deciding who makes the playoffs, you could have sudden death overtime, the way it was intended.

Expanding the playoffs would have some unintended consequences like reducing the number of sellers at the trade deadline. It could also lead to some random results like a 10-seed potentially knocking off a 1-seed ravaging the heavyweight matchups we crave to see. But the playoff format already has a lot of randomness. I don’t see how this would make it worse.

The one genuine concern that I have is that it may actually be advantageous for teams to play the play-in game. By getting their feet wet in a playoff atmosphere while their top-seeded opponent sits around for days waiting, the low-seeded play-in team may come into game one better ready to compete.

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As I noted earlier in the week, the countdown to summer is on, so each day I do the ramblings I'll be focusing on larger topics like I did with goalie consistency off the top. If you have any topics you wish to see covered, give me a shout in the comments below.

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